While Office 12, Microsoft's next-generation desktop suite, is not expected to hit Beta 1 until later this fall, Microsoft officials are set to show off a number of its components at the company's annual Professional Developers Conference in mid-September. Recent developer conferences have focused almost exclusively on operating system and tools futures. But this year's will include dozens of tracks aimed at Office developers and users.

To n4cer: you are right about this. In fact, the Office 12 file formats are utterly copied from Open Document, the new OASIS filr format. But the license applying to the XML schemas is the same one that applies to today's MS Office XML schemas, and it's definitely not an open one...